2026 Cloud Predictions - Part 3

Industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 3 covers Multi, Hybrid and Private Cloud.

MULTI-CLOUD

Multi-Cloud Will Become the Default Operating Model: A big part due to recent disruptions, multi-cloud is going to become the default operating model in 2026. As we see an acceleration in multi-cloud strategies, we will move beyond vendor-specific Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) and more toward tools like Terraform to build and deploy across multiple clouds.
John Waller
Cloud & Security Practice Lead, UltraViolet Cyber

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Will Become a Strategic Architecture, Not a Choice: Most enterprise clients are already using more than one hyperscaler, driven by a deliberate strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and negotiate discounted rates on bulk service mapping. In 2026, multi-cloud and hybrid environments will become architectural necessities. Organizations will strategically place critical components in the public cloud for scalability and high availability, use private cloud for data security and cheaper hardware for AI initiatives, and rely on specialized clouds for AI and compliance workloads. This diversification will define cloud strategy through the next year.
Rohan Gupta
VP, Cloud, Security & DevOps, R Systems

OPEN-SOURCE MULTI-CLOUD

2026 cloud strategy will be defined by freedom, not footprint. Enterprises are realizing that single-provider dependency has become the biggest threat to agility and negotiating power. The next wave of growth will come from open source–driven, multi-cloud architectures that preserve flexibility while still harnessing hyperscaler scale.
Anil Inamdar
Global Head of Data, NetApp Instaclustr

MULTI-CLOUD DRIVES AIOPS

Multi-cloud strategies will strengthen demand for third-party AIOps platforms, as enterprises avoid hyperscaler vendor lock-in and seek end-to-end integration across hybrid environments.
Ritu Dubey
Market Head, Digitate

HYBRID ECOSYSTEMS

In 2026, we'll watch the big three cloud providers lose their monopoly on enterprise compute. Companies will architect hybrid ecosystems that stretch across hyperscalers, private infrastructure, and the edge — driven not by cost-cutting, but by control. The days of one-cloud dependency are ending; agility will come from being everywhere at once.
Dr. Hema Raghavan
Head of Engineering and Co-Founder, Kumo

THE GREAT UNCLOUDING

The great "unclouding": After years of expanding multi-cloud architectures, organizations will start simplifying. We'll see a push to consolidate workloads into fewer, better-managed platforms to regain cost control and performance.
Ha Hoang
CIO, Commvault

PRIVATE CLOUD

Private clouds will grow in the next year or so: From my conversations with IT leaders, I'm inclined to believe private cloud will grow in the next year or so. That said, the definition of "private cloud" is not clear and varies by audience. For some private cloud means a well-defined set of capabilities wholly hosted on a hyperscaler's infrastructure. For others it means "cloud like" capabilities hosted in a private or colo hosted data center. And yet, for others, it means a hybrid approach across multiple public and private locations including the neoclouds. Whatever the definition is — the point is that most companies mean it to be a largely bespoke implementation that meets their organizations' needs. That will, for sure, continue if not grow.
Juan Orlandini
Chief Technology Officer, North America, Insight Enterprises

As we look ahead to 2026, we'll see even more investment in data centers as hyperscalers continue to lead the way. AI is driving massive demand for processing power and energy, and the cost of cloud isn't going down anytime soon. As that continues to grow, we'll also see cooling and power costs rise right alongside it. At the same time, customers will take a more balanced approach, keeping their most critical, revenue-driven workloads in private cloud environments and use hyperscalers for projects that are less central to the business. 
Ryan Huffine
VP of Services, SHI

As macroeconomic trends drive a focus on cost cutting, this could mark the beginning of a cloud repatriation, as CIOs and CFOs finally calculate the true cost of achieving enterprise-grade availability on public cloud, where anything beyond basic SLAs requires redundant regions and architectures that can cost many multiples of initial estimates. After watching hyperscaler outages take down critical infrastructure repeatedly, enterprises will realize that modern private cloud solutions now deliver superior uptime at predictable costs, with many offering 99.99%+ SLAs as standard versus the 99.95% you get from hyperscalers. The migrations back to private cloud will accelerate as companies discover they can achieve better availability, predictable monthly costs, and actual accountability from their providers, without playing Russian roulette every time a hyperscaler has a bad day.
Nick Zeigler
VP, Digital Innovation, All Covered

CLOUD REPATRIATION

After years of aggressive cloud migration, companies have increasingly realized that public cloud isn't the best fit for every workload. While public cloud still is the right choice for some, rising costs and performance frustrations are driving leaders to evaluate which applications are truly fit for the cloud. In 2026, cloud repatriation will become a strategic focus for organizations rethinking their cloud approach. Automated, static workloads are likely to move back on-premises or into private clouds to cut increasing costs. IT leaders who ask the right questions and prioritize a "think first" over "act first" mindset will make the most of repatriation.
Jesse Stockall
Chief Architect, Flexera

The cloud is going to see serious competition from cloud exits to the data center, both because of cost control and data sovereignty. People are realizing that the flexibility of the cloud is now available on-premises, and the risk of not controlling your own destiny (both in terms of cost and outages) is non-trivial.
Steve Francis
CEO, Sidero Labs

PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering Will Become the Backbone of Multi-Cloud and DevOps Success: As cloud and DevOps mature into central components of business operations, the industry will see a surge in demand for multi-cloud engineers, platform engineers, AIOps and intelligent automation engineers, DevSecOps and cloud security engineers, site reliability engineers, and FinOps analysts. Soon, organizations will be operating across multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge-native environments that are too complex for manual or siloed DevOps teams. The most impactful investment will be hybrid-cloud capability building supported by platform engineering, which will hide infrastructure complexity while enforcing security, compliance, and cost controls automatically.
Rohan Gupta
VP, Cloud, Security & DevOps, R Systems

Check back next week for DataOps predictions

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2026 Cloud Predictions - Part 3

Industry experts offer predictions on how Cloud will evolve and impact business in 2026. Part 3 covers Multi, Hybrid and Private Cloud.

MULTI-CLOUD

Multi-Cloud Will Become the Default Operating Model: A big part due to recent disruptions, multi-cloud is going to become the default operating model in 2026. As we see an acceleration in multi-cloud strategies, we will move beyond vendor-specific Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) and more toward tools like Terraform to build and deploy across multiple clouds.
John Waller
Cloud & Security Practice Lead, UltraViolet Cyber

Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Will Become a Strategic Architecture, Not a Choice: Most enterprise clients are already using more than one hyperscaler, driven by a deliberate strategy to avoid vendor lock-in and negotiate discounted rates on bulk service mapping. In 2026, multi-cloud and hybrid environments will become architectural necessities. Organizations will strategically place critical components in the public cloud for scalability and high availability, use private cloud for data security and cheaper hardware for AI initiatives, and rely on specialized clouds for AI and compliance workloads. This diversification will define cloud strategy through the next year.
Rohan Gupta
VP, Cloud, Security & DevOps, R Systems

OPEN-SOURCE MULTI-CLOUD

2026 cloud strategy will be defined by freedom, not footprint. Enterprises are realizing that single-provider dependency has become the biggest threat to agility and negotiating power. The next wave of growth will come from open source–driven, multi-cloud architectures that preserve flexibility while still harnessing hyperscaler scale.
Anil Inamdar
Global Head of Data, NetApp Instaclustr

MULTI-CLOUD DRIVES AIOPS

Multi-cloud strategies will strengthen demand for third-party AIOps platforms, as enterprises avoid hyperscaler vendor lock-in and seek end-to-end integration across hybrid environments.
Ritu Dubey
Market Head, Digitate

HYBRID ECOSYSTEMS

In 2026, we'll watch the big three cloud providers lose their monopoly on enterprise compute. Companies will architect hybrid ecosystems that stretch across hyperscalers, private infrastructure, and the edge — driven not by cost-cutting, but by control. The days of one-cloud dependency are ending; agility will come from being everywhere at once.
Dr. Hema Raghavan
Head of Engineering and Co-Founder, Kumo

THE GREAT UNCLOUDING

The great "unclouding": After years of expanding multi-cloud architectures, organizations will start simplifying. We'll see a push to consolidate workloads into fewer, better-managed platforms to regain cost control and performance.
Ha Hoang
CIO, Commvault

PRIVATE CLOUD

Private clouds will grow in the next year or so: From my conversations with IT leaders, I'm inclined to believe private cloud will grow in the next year or so. That said, the definition of "private cloud" is not clear and varies by audience. For some private cloud means a well-defined set of capabilities wholly hosted on a hyperscaler's infrastructure. For others it means "cloud like" capabilities hosted in a private or colo hosted data center. And yet, for others, it means a hybrid approach across multiple public and private locations including the neoclouds. Whatever the definition is — the point is that most companies mean it to be a largely bespoke implementation that meets their organizations' needs. That will, for sure, continue if not grow.
Juan Orlandini
Chief Technology Officer, North America, Insight Enterprises

As we look ahead to 2026, we'll see even more investment in data centers as hyperscalers continue to lead the way. AI is driving massive demand for processing power and energy, and the cost of cloud isn't going down anytime soon. As that continues to grow, we'll also see cooling and power costs rise right alongside it. At the same time, customers will take a more balanced approach, keeping their most critical, revenue-driven workloads in private cloud environments and use hyperscalers for projects that are less central to the business. 
Ryan Huffine
VP of Services, SHI

As macroeconomic trends drive a focus on cost cutting, this could mark the beginning of a cloud repatriation, as CIOs and CFOs finally calculate the true cost of achieving enterprise-grade availability on public cloud, where anything beyond basic SLAs requires redundant regions and architectures that can cost many multiples of initial estimates. After watching hyperscaler outages take down critical infrastructure repeatedly, enterprises will realize that modern private cloud solutions now deliver superior uptime at predictable costs, with many offering 99.99%+ SLAs as standard versus the 99.95% you get from hyperscalers. The migrations back to private cloud will accelerate as companies discover they can achieve better availability, predictable monthly costs, and actual accountability from their providers, without playing Russian roulette every time a hyperscaler has a bad day.
Nick Zeigler
VP, Digital Innovation, All Covered

CLOUD REPATRIATION

After years of aggressive cloud migration, companies have increasingly realized that public cloud isn't the best fit for every workload. While public cloud still is the right choice for some, rising costs and performance frustrations are driving leaders to evaluate which applications are truly fit for the cloud. In 2026, cloud repatriation will become a strategic focus for organizations rethinking their cloud approach. Automated, static workloads are likely to move back on-premises or into private clouds to cut increasing costs. IT leaders who ask the right questions and prioritize a "think first" over "act first" mindset will make the most of repatriation.
Jesse Stockall
Chief Architect, Flexera

The cloud is going to see serious competition from cloud exits to the data center, both because of cost control and data sovereignty. People are realizing that the flexibility of the cloud is now available on-premises, and the risk of not controlling your own destiny (both in terms of cost and outages) is non-trivial.
Steve Francis
CEO, Sidero Labs

PLATFORM ENGINEERING

Platform Engineering Will Become the Backbone of Multi-Cloud and DevOps Success: As cloud and DevOps mature into central components of business operations, the industry will see a surge in demand for multi-cloud engineers, platform engineers, AIOps and intelligent automation engineers, DevSecOps and cloud security engineers, site reliability engineers, and FinOps analysts. Soon, organizations will be operating across multi-cloud, hybrid, and edge-native environments that are too complex for manual or siloed DevOps teams. The most impactful investment will be hybrid-cloud capability building supported by platform engineering, which will hide infrastructure complexity while enforcing security, compliance, and cost controls automatically.
Rohan Gupta
VP, Cloud, Security & DevOps, R Systems

Check back next week for DataOps predictions

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Implementing AI Isn't the Hard Part Anymore - Adoption Is

Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...

 

The Incident Load Is Rising, but Recovery Times Aren't Moving

Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...

Your AI Pipeline May Have a Document Observability Problem

When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...

The SIEM Isn't the Problem. Your Telemetry Architecture Is

If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...

As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...

Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ...